There are a ton of brands in the modern cannabis landscape, but few of these players truly understand what being a brand really means. There’s a lot more to it than just coming up with a catchy name and logo. Even worse, it seems like in today’s market even fewer make their consumers the actual focal point of what they’re doing. Maybe that’s why it’s not working out for so many of them.
While we’ve seen countless companies try and fail to make a name for themselves in this burgeoning industry, Alien Labs lives in rarified air. It hasn’t just amassed a cult-like following. It’s growing, and does so with integrity.
Created in 2014 by Ted Lidie, Alien Labs was founded not just on a love for incredible weed, but as a bat signal for all the other outsiders who didn’t fit into the hype lifestyle of the moment. While hip-hop seemed to be the thing most closely associated with cannabis in the mainstream at that point, Lidie realized there were a lot of other people out there, just like him, who loved good weed, but didn’t fit that mold, and he built his business around catering to them.
To me, this is the quintessential American success story. Alien Labs isn’t some corporate-funded project, it was bootstrapped. It wasn’t created in a boardroom by suits, but in the grow, by people who truly love the plant. Lidie built this thing with his hands, from nothing. But now… now it’s really something.
THE ORIGINAL ALIEN
Lidie was born in Oregon, but spent most of his life in Redding, California where his mother’s family is from. His father’s family is from Cottonwood, not too far away, and his dad has been growing cannabis since long before Lidie was born, though he was largely insulated from that work. Lidie didn’t spend his formative years on the farm. In fact, when he initially started smoking with his friend Scott in seventh grade, it wasn’t even his family’s primo—it was some traditional “mex” as it was called back then. Brick weed. But Lidie was instantly infatuated by the plant, and even remembers the first real headies he smoked: some Afgoo stolen from a friend’s parent.
When he got older, sometime during high school, it
